Review of Laos

In all, I am really glad I visited Laos.  It's like everything that's right about Cambodia with none of the onerous ridiculousness.  The roads are paved, NGOs haven't ruined the capital city, no Western do-gooders keep blaming genocide that happened 40 years ago for every current problem, etc.  (Sorry Cambodia.  But these are areas to be improved.)

A word of advice is not to go during New Years.  Travel is more difficult, more expensive, and you're likely to get wet if you try to walk (by all means go if you like water fights).  Everyone's drunk and they drive drunk.  They give you free beer, which most people would like, but a) I hate beer and b)when you're an inexperienced motorist trying to drive an inordinate number of kilometers before dark...  And a lot of things are just shut down.  Plenty of people report being invited out with locals, but things like this hardly ever happen to me.  Hence my verdict.

My favorite part was The Loop, and I would never ever ever want to do it again.  It would diminish its value.  I would, however, go back to Vang Vieng.  Hmm...

I'm also glad I visited the White Temple in Thailand.  That's worth seeing.

This is a useless entry, but it's mainly here for my own future reference.

The Horror that was Japan

I'm going to be putting up several entries shortly.  I wrote them when I was in Japan but couldn't bring myself to publish them.  Reading them over, I am struck by the frank despair and emotional turmoil they exude.

I know I'm apparently expected to be "positive" on these blog thingies, but I'm seriously not even going to TRY to mask over the shit I endured there.  Understand, I was in the middle of a 15-month depressive episode that could easily have killed me (I used to go into the kitchen at night and try to drive knives into my wrists, too damn bad they were too dull because otherwise you might believe me).

I remember these days as living under a grey mist of bleak despair.  If you have ever flown through a storm, this is how it felt--grey, melancholy, uncertain.  I literally did not experience one good thing during this time--and with that assertion, I expect the same outcry I got when I tried to explain my feelings on psych forums..."just look for the positive!"; "I don't want to hear all this negativity, plenty of good things are happening in your life"; "And I was depressed in high school, get over it".

So don't even try that.  DON'T.  EVEN.  TRY.  I've heard it all, and if you're seriously going to try, all I can say is you're a hell of a privileged little shit to even be able to THINK those kinds of thoughts.  I've endured more than you ever will, and you hold no moral superiority over me, so take your positive thinking and shove it up your ass next to your head and kindly pass enough methane gas to suffocate yourself.

Because I strongly believe in presenting the truth of my experience, I will publish these entires, backdated, no matter how pathetic...and you can read about them here.

In rough chronological order...

- Part I: A Long, Angry Preamble

- Part II: Arriving in Japan 

- Part III: Depression  

- Part IV: LOL Dork 

- Part V: The Psychopath 

- Part VI: The Toll TEFL Takes

Khmer: A Learning Adventure

For 2 years, I studied Khmer with a private tutor.  For fun.

You know, it was a chaotic world that I had to fight every single day.  I was sick and struggling and had little control of my life, and the world seemed very hard and brutal.  Khmer lessons were my one little place where I could just talk nonsense, make mistakes and not suffer for it, talk to friendly people, just relax and be happy.  It was my one lifeline to humanity, in short.

I never progressed much, because we rushed through 4 or 5 books in a year....though they never printed more 5th level books for the remainder of my time there.  So I just spoke about my life and ideas using simple language and never really got anywhere.

Just one hour, every day.

Just like a fool, I never learned to read.  I just didn't want to--my faith in reading and writing has diminished ever since I studied languages in high school and college.  Experience shows that it tends to result in people relying on written notes and not being able to speak the damn language.

But now I'm learning to read and write.  I'm glad I am.  It's just like being a kid again--I realize that all these words are spelled differently than I expected.

Like as a 3 year old learning to spell (yes, I begged my mom to teach me to read and write when I was 3), I was pretty sure it was written,

hte bran fox jumpt in hte wodr

When I went was in the first grade, I learned to my amazement that it's

The brown fox jumped in the water.

Same with Khmer.  It's...not spelled like I thought it would be.  There are double letters on the end of words.  Silent -e's that change the internal vowel sound and other letters on the end.  Like English.  Things literally transliterated as -ette, with the -te being unpronounced. Like English.  Silent m's.  The rules are sometimes bent, and if you don't know the word, you might not be able to guess it.  It's one of the few languages where kids have spelling tests throughout school...just like English.

Worse, there are old letters people still sometimes use.  Like how English has ae and oe merged as dipthongs...you sometimes find them in older publications...you know the ones: 

These old-fashioned letters, in addition to the approximately 60 "core" letters...in addition to diacritic marks....in addition to variations on the core letters that are written beneath other letters to form a consonant cluster...

This isn't even all of them...I promise

Well take the word "khnyom", which means the personal pronoun "I" in some contexts.

It's written,

That's literally like writing,

FUCK.

Most words are like this.  I am really glad I did not attempt this before.  Prospective learners should make a mental note not to try this at home.

Bus Trip to Phnom Penh: The Crossing

I wish I could say the 11-hour bus trip back to Phnom Penh from 4000 Islands was speedy and uneventful.  Alas.

First of all, we had to meet on the pier before 8 am to take the ferry back to the mainland.  They then had us wait in the bus station for 2 hours, since the buses didn't leave until 10.  I mean, it's always good to plan ahead and leave a pocket of time, but wtf, 2 hours??

So, finally on the bus, we sat there for another hour while they checked our tickets ad nauseum.

Our bus driver got on and was just like, Sorry, I've never driven this route before.  I have no idea what they're doing.  I guess this is a Lao thing, where they just check your tickets a lot.

Does not inspire confidence.

Eventually we got on our way...and drove to the border.  Crossing it was another matter.  I've had some shitty border crossings in my day, but this was definitely up there.

First, they make you buy a quarantine sheet for a dollar.  Like seriously, it's just some useless public health statement that you pay a dollar for.  It's not present at any other border, just on the Lao-Cambodia border.  They were pretty insistent that I take one though.

Then I got inside to the line, and two guys are checking 100 of us into the country.  One guy got into an altercation with one of the border guards, I have no idea about what...there were no instructions, so I wound up standing in the wrong line for about 15 minutes before shouting at people.

Finally, I got inside the country (they were very weird about my passport because of all the visas inside it; I was slightly worried I'd be refused entry).

Well, I bought some fried rice, just as the bus was pulling away (I mean I got on it, but I didn't have time to eat).

We hadn't been driving more than an hour when I was slammed forward by the bus jamming on its brakes...we then swerved sharply to the left...I thought we were going over the guardrail.  I looked out my window, and all these cows were tumbling across the road, picking themselves up, and bolting.  I looked behind, and a cow lay in the road.  The stupid animals, for reasons unknown, decided to run as a herd in front of the bus.

Anyway, I didn't die, but a cow did.  The front bumper of the bus was semi-dissembled.  Between all these mishaps, I made it home around 11pm that evening and simply walked to my house and collapsed on the bed.

And that was my trip to Laos.  I get the sense that Cambodia doesn't want me back...

Anyway, that was a unique bus trip.  They're not typically that weird.  Be careful on the road, guys.

Four Thousand Islands

Making back from The Loop did not bestow upon me the hero's welcome I had hoped for (I mean just kidding, people think I'm very pompous when I use language like that.  It's a rhetorical device meaning it wasn't a real soft or glorious return).

As I pulled into town, New Year's celebrations were going full swing, meaning crazed teenagers were throwing water on every passerby and shooting people with water guns from the back of trucks.  It was like civil chaos!  If civil chaos were a giant squirt-gun fight.

Not a shop was open.  Including at the guest house (The Travel Lodge, once again utterly failing me).  So that meal that I had been postponing so I could make it back in time for the bus?  Didn't happen.  I was hungry, exhausted, cranky, with a kink in my left shoulder from holding the handlebar so long.

Luckily, I had a plan for this.  It was called, Get the Hell Away!  The last stop on my trip was 4000 Islands.  The only bus to 4000 Islands left at 6pm, so I took a tuk tuk there with a couple of German tourists (my mood was somewhat lifted by the profusion of snacks in the bus station).

It was a 12-hour bus ride.  Luckily, I found a hole (yes, on the bus) and slept in it for 9 of those hours after eating a profusion of fetal eggs.

And then we were at 4000 Islands, last stop before Cambodia.

You have to take a ferry to get there.  

The Ferry to Four Thousand Islands

Four Thousand Islands is like some sort of archpelago in the middle of the Mekong--but there are probably more like 10 000 islands, some of which sustain a single bush, others of which stretch for miles.  We were obviously on one of the bigger islands.

See that lil bush island?  Yep.

It's like Stonerville, I could just tell by walking though.  Luckily, it's also rural Laos, so I rented this strictly low-quality bungalow (I mean run down and very basic) for 5 dollars.  And then just relaxed.  Just sat on the hammock by the river and chilled.  So glad my vacation was nearing its end.

See how rural that is?

I was hoping to see the dolphins that live nearby, or take a sunset cruise...alas, it was day after New Years, and everyone was too lazy/sleepy/drunk/whatever to actually cater to tourists.  I tried to explore, but if you go across the island, you basically have to pay to access the other half, what the hell.

To compensate for boredom, I took pictures of the only two fully sober individuals I found on any of the many thousands of islands:

So yep.  A day of rest and not much more. 

Tha Khek: The Loop

The ancient map I used to find treasure/El Dorado/the Fountain of Youth/The Loop

Every so often something comes along that's just so unique, so epic, so beautiful--so AWESOME--that I have to try it.  This time, it was a phenomenon known as The Loop--a 450 kilometer ring road located in central Laos.  The embarkation point is typically Tha Khek, where you can rent a motorbike for $6 a day.

Having recently learned how to operate one, I was now able to complete this small dream.

The Motorbike

I woke up miserable after 3 hours' sleep on a bench since my guesthouse locked me out (this coming on top of pushing hard for over a week, and no breakfast), but, I was standing in front of the motorbike rental shop at opening.  Zombie-like, I rented a motorbike for 3 days and headed out on my quest.  It eventually perked me up.

Navigator

And that's all you do.  You get on the motorbike and drive in a large circle down a surprisingly well-paved motorway.  And you just...look at stuff.  There are innumerable caves you can visit along the way, a cold spring, lakes, carvings, a waterfall, and all kinds of wildlife.  The roads are in the middle of nowhere, you hardly meet any other drivers...and God the scenery.

The landscape is beautiful--karsts and weird-shaped mountains abound, you drive through cool mountain forests and emerald plains, and there are times when you just pull of the road and sing praises to God.  It is that beautiful--the kind of beauty that knocks the cynicism off your soul and washes away years of acquired corruption.  These photos are but an insulting misrepresentation of it.

Caves:

Outside...

One of the earlier caves I saw.  It was only this, as near as I could figure out.

Entrance to Tham Nang Cave

Thong Lor Cave...weirdly, it stretches for miles along a through-river.  This was the side where we emerged.

...and in

The trippy interior of Tham Nang cave

For some reason, when we got past the glowing stalactites, we came upon an internal lake...with boats.

Inside Thong Lor Cave

Thong Lor Cave

Thong Lor

Thong Lor

Thong Lor

Exiting Thong Lor on the other side

Some other part of Thong Lor

And check out these cave sparkles from Tham Nang cave:

The scenery:

Notice the stereotypical herons flying near the karst

Many worlds

Imagine living with these in your back yard

Uplifting guesthouse

Lovely dead tree zone

I don't know why there was a fairy tale castle in rural Laos.  It was behind the gas station.

Scenery from a boat

Actually this is the guesthouse I stayed at.  Or a resort, rather, because it was where my motorbike ran out of gas.

I mean, the lighting. God.

Thumbs up, lil rock.

The culture:

This was a Buddhist shrine in a cave, where there was also a New Year's celebration

You know what they say, if you meet the Buddha by the side of the road...

Can you believe there's just a highway in the middle of this stuff though?

Entry gate to a temple.  My favorite pic of all these.

And yes, this cold spring was COLD.

Lovely typical Laotian meal lol

Even the butterflies were celebrating

You meet people along the way--if you stop for a meal, if you cross paths with fellow travellers, or if you're like me, you go during New Years and kids for a road block and proceed to dump water on you (trust me, this feels good; just be careful of your phone).  And then they give you cold beer.

I ate at this family's restaurant.

This guy gave me free beer after pouring cold water on me.

These kids threw water on me

You can stop and look at everything (I couldn't keep up with the other travellers on my course because I kept getting off to take pictures of things) and you could stretch the journey much longer than the requisite 3 days typically recommended.

I wish I could put it into better words than this, but it's the sort of thing that has to be felt and experienced to really be understood.  If you do it, you will never regret it.